Xenobots- Living Robots That Can Replicate

The American scientists who created the first 'living robots'—xenobots—claim that these life forms can now reproduce via a method different from that of all other organisms known to science.

Xenobots are formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). These embryonic stem cells are supposed to develop into the skin in the frog. Less than a millimetre wide,they are situated on the tadpole's external surface and keep out pathogens and redistribute mucus. Experiments have proved that they can move, self-heal and work together. To make xenobots, researchers scraped living stem cells from the frog embryo and incubated them. They did not manipulate the genome of the extracted cells. One cannot classify xenobots as a robot or an organism. Josh Bongard, a computer science professor at the University of Vermont, explains, "Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics, but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which can act on its own on behalf of people, in that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cells."

The scientists who developed xenobots say that they can exhibit a new kind of biological reproduction. Frogs have a method for normal reproduction, but when the stem cells were liberated from the embryo, they figured out a new way to reproduce. Bongard narrates that xenobots were initially sphere-shaped and were capable of replication, but they did so rarely and only under specific circumstances. Xenobots replicate via kinetic replication, a process that is known to occur at molecular levels but has never been observed at the cellular scale.

Using artificial intelligence, the scientists tested billions of body shapes to identify the one that would help xenobots replicate more effectively. AI came up with C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, a 1980s video game. Pac-Man shaped xenobots were able to locate tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather a lot of them in their mouth and in a matter of days, the stem cell bundles developed into new xenobots.

Greatbatch's invention was one of the most important of the 20th century, giving a renewed lease on life to millions of people in the decades after his serendipitous discovery. He once quoted, "Failure is a learning experience, and the guy who has never failed has never done anything.” Greatbatch was a tenacious inventor who reminds us that failure itself is often the heartbeat of discovery, making us confident to endeavor new things in life.